Artist Statement
Processing and reprocessing cultural and personal iconography, my work ranges from visual diary to social critique; narrative symbols and metaphoric images weave stories and pose questions from the daily to the universal. Just as in Pop Art, my work vibrates between “low” and “high”, influenced as much by art and painting history as consumer culture, religion, outsider and folk art, graffiti, and tattoo flash—finding expression in painting and drawing, ceramics, and mixed media sculptural constructions. They are all forms of storytelling, and the work is meant to be read. Through ranging mark-making language, speed, and layering—from the rendered to the naive, I am able to adjust possible meaning, interpretation, and expectation.
This new body of work, “3x” from 2019 continues many of my same questions and processes from over the years, though the compositional sectioning into thirds is something totally new. Three as a number and symbol itself becomes a continuous element in the work in all of its familiar associations and connotations, and the composition opens up as I consider them modular sections, and the relationship between parts and the whole. Gold bars appear new too, as space and form already full, precious, and open. They get right to the point. The work on panel I consider as both painting and drawing, physically and spatially allowing more density of drawing marks, whereas the larger work on canvas operate more familiarly as paintings.